EXCLUSIVE: Millennium Hotel overhaul not a done deal

Hotel promised upgrades to convention planners

Oct. 15, 2013

The Millennium Hotel Cincinnati, across Elm Street from the Duke Energy Convention Center, is Downtown's largest hotel. Complaints about its poor condition threaten to damage the city's convention business. / The Enquirer/Gary Landers

At least two groups planning conventions in Cincinnati say Millennium Hotel representatives have promised upgrades within two years, as city officials said Tuesday that talks with the hotel are progressing.

Both the Prince Hall Shriners and the U.S. Institute of Theatre Technology say they booked 2015 conventions here on the understanding that the city’s convention hotel would be renovated.

“They’ve been promising to make some major improvements,” said Steve Reece, a Cincinnati businessman who lobbied his fellow Prince Hall Shriners to bring more than 25,000 people here for the international group’s annual gathering.

Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory said Tuesday that Millennium & Copthorne Hotels has made no promises about renovations but has agreed to conduct a feasibility study with the city to see what kind of improvements the market will support.

“I think we’re going down a path that is going somewhere,” Mallory told The Enquirer. “This seems like the first time it’s been real.”

City officials have been pushing for years for a top-to-bottom overhaul of the increasingly shabby hotel. It’s the city’s largest hotel with 872 rooms and is the only one attached to the Duke Energy Convention Center, making it critical to the city’s convention business. However, the city has had little luck getting the attention of the Singapore-based ownership.

Late last week, Mallory, City Manager Milton Dohoney Jr. and several other Cincinnati officials flew to Los Angeles to meet with Millennium’s chief executive, Wong Hong Ren – the highest-level negotiations to date.

Neither the timetable of the study nor who will pay for it has yet been decided, but the sides will nail down those details before a followup meeting in November. “They recognize that it needs to be improved, but the level of investment that they were talking about equated to a facelift, and so that’s why we were really pushing,” Mallory said.

He noted that the Cincinnati property is the largest in the Millennium chain, which stretches to Asia, Europe and across the United States.

Millennium officials couldn’t be reached late Tuesday.

Talks on renovations, which could require city financial assistance, heated up after an Enquirer story and video in late May detailed damaged or dirty floors, ceilings, bathrooms and furniture in the hotel. Hotel executives flew to Cincinnati, but city officials received no firm commitment on improvements.

Failure to upgrade the Millennium could damage the city’s convention business well into the future. About half of the groups that come here use that hotel, often in conjunction with other hotels, according to the Cincinnati USA Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB).

Reece, operator of Integrity Hall in Bond Hill and father of state Rep. Alicia Reece, said he landed the Shriners’ 2015 convention in Cincinnati only after a daylong debate among members. Many preferred Kansas City specifically because of bad experiences at the Millennium during the group’s 2011 convention here, he said.

“My credibility is really on the line because I went against the grain to get the members to support it,” Reece said. The group’s 2015 experience “will definitely have an impact on whether in the future we will be successful in bringing conventions back to the city.”

Before 2011, the Prince Hall Shriners hadn’t met in Cincinnati for 50 years. It’s the oldest African-American fraternal organization and together with its women’s auxiliary is expected to spend $6 million during the 2015 convention.

A representative of the U.S. Institute of Theatre Technology said the hotel also promised that group a “complete renovation.” Executive Director David Grindle said he’s in talks with the CVB as his convention of 5,000 people approaches.

“Our people are excited about being in Cincinnati,” said Grindle, whose association has met here several times. “The theater life there is unbelievable. There has to be a resolution, because we’re coming to Cincinnati.”

Millennium General Manager Bill Loughran declined to comment.

The last major work at the 45-year-old hotel was a $17 million makeover in 2001. The Millennium installed hundreds of new mattresses after the Enquirer’s May report. And Julie Calvert, a spokeswoman for the CVB, said old tube TVs have recently been replaced with flat screens.

An extensive renovation could cost $120 million-plus and take well over a year, according to experts such as Bobby Bowers, senior vice president of Smith Travel Research.

That prompts another worry for Reece: In addition to the international convention in 2015, the Prince Hall Shriners and related groups are planning four smaller meetings in Cincinnati in 2014. He’s concerned that, if the Millennium does make renovations by 2015, it will affect next year’s events.

The St. Louis Millennium, which is owned by the same group, closed more than half of its 780 rooms in March for a renovation that’s still not complete. The abrupt announcement left convention groups and the St. Louis CVB scrambling to make alternate plans.

Hotels generally try to avoid that kind of disruption, Bowers said – often closing just seven or eight floors at a time during renovations to minimize the loss of business.

The bigger concern for Reece is no renovation at all, which is why the Prince Hall Shriners are seeking a written promise of specific changes.

Following meetings with hotel officials, Reece hopes to have a commitment on improvements within 60 days.

“The Millennium has to step up or get out of the game – come on now,” he said. “We got the sense that they understood what our concerns were and they were going to go to work on it.